Tuesday Night Open Mic for October 26, 2010

Tuesday night crept up on me this week. I continue to have a lot to do with work and have managed to thus far keep my head above water with so much going on. I will be going through some big changes over the next month or so. I therefore may be changing some of the schedule of when I post articles and what nights become the mainstays (although I haven’t really figured that part out quite yet). I have received several emails asking why I am not talking more about the elections, as they are only a week away at this point. I simply think there is so much out there already that we would be wasting time attempting to discuss them all. Furthermore, I have my races that I am personally interested in but I have no idea which ones the rest of you are interested in discussing. As this is open mic, feel free to offer up your thoughts on any races that you are interested in discussing. I am following them as much as I can, but simply haven’t had the time to evaluate them. I will begin tonight with just three articles. I will try to find time tomorrow to add another article or two as time permits. I hope you all are having a great week so far.

Comments

An aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid repeatedly lied to federal immigration and FBI agents and submitted false federal documents to the Department of Homeland Security to cover up her illegal seven-year marriage to a Lebanese national who was the subject of an Oklahoma City Joint Terror Task Force investigation, FoxNews.com has learned.

Diana Tejada, Reid’s Hispanic Press Secretary, admitted to receiving payment for “some of her expenses” in exchange for fraudulently marrying Bassam Mahmoud Tarhini in 2003, strictly so he could obtain permanent U.S. residency, according to court documents.

Tarhini, now 37, was held in jail and at an immigration detention center in connection with his 2009 indictment on felony charges, documents show. He pleaded guilty to entering a fraudulent marriage to evade immigration laws — a Class D felony — in November 2009, and he was deported in March 2010.

Tejada, now 28, was never charged for her role in the crime.

“We did not charge the woman, and of course we don’t discuss the reasons we don’t charge people,” said Bob Troester, spokesman for the Western District of Oklahoma U.S. Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted the case, which began as an FBI investigation out of the Oklahoma City Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement would not comment on why it took five years to investigate the couple’s marriage.

As recently as five weeks ago, on Sept. 21, 2010, Tejada appeared as a guest on a Spanish-language radio program in her official capacity as a spokeswoman for Harry Reid.

Monday evening, Reid’s spokesman Jim Manley said Tejada was no longer employed by Reid’s office. When asked when Tejada left Reid’s services, the spokesman had no comment.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/25/exclusive-aide-to-harry-reid-lied-to-feds-submitted-false-documents-about-sham-marriage/

As much as it pains me to do so, I find that I have to come to the defense of Harry Reid. I know. I know. There are heads exploding as this is read by the loyal readers at SUFA. I see this as a pretty lame attempt to attack Harry Reid just before election day in an attempt to soil his name with voters. This story apeared on Fox News, and it should be noted that the story leads with Senator Reid’s name.

What exactly does Harry Reid have to do with this woman and her illegal activity? The Senate Majority leader literally has dozens and dozens of aides who work for that office. Reid more than likely barely remembers the names of all of his “aides,” let alone knows much more than that about them. This wasn’t his Chief of Staff or a major player who is in contact with Reid on a daily basis. This is some low level staffer who has no real affiliation with the Senator at a substantive level.

Now, if it should come to light that Reid was the reason that she was not prosecuted for this or that Reid was aware the entire time that she was engaged in an illegal marriage, then I will change my tune and realize that there is a story here that needs to be exposed. But there is no mention of either one of those being the case, let alone any evidence to support such a claim. As such it seems to me that Fox News is attempting to run with a story that has little relevance in terms of Senator Reid himself.

Does that mean this is not news? Of course not. It is news. We have a member of the staff of the Senate Majority Leader of the United States Congress illegally married to a foreign national who may possibly have ties to terrorism (although that has also not been proven that I know of). First, what kind of security does the Congress employ that this wasn’t caught on some sort of background check?

Second, I don’t understand why she was not prosecuted for this crime. She admits now that she took money to marry someone to gain them access to the US. That is a serious crime on its own. She was not charged even though the husband was. Further, she outright lied to federal investigators when she was questioned about this. Serious offense number two. Again no charges were filed. If she were, say, a former major league baseball player who lied about taking steroids, the government would have gone after her for perjury.

So what think you, SUFA? Is Fox out of line? Does this woman and her transgression merit any link to Senator Reid? Other than answering how a woman doing this and under investigation by the FBI possibly got clearance to be on his staff, does he have anything to answer for?

I don’t really have a problem with the article. It mentions that this person is an aide to Harry Reid…which she was, but does not place any blame on him. This is quite unlike the Meg Whitman deal in California.

Julian Assange’s single-minded focus on the Iraq war — and publishing a trove of leaked documents that government officials say puts U.S. soldiers at risk — may be threatening the very stability of Wikileaks.

While the whistle-blowing website and its outspoken front man Assange have proudly passed out access to the secure documents they’ve uncovered, a diverse collection of former staffers, activists and volunteers are taking issue with the organization and its mission.

They describe an organization that is largely out of control, driven by the personality and ego of its founder, Julian Assange.

At least five people from the core group have left because of disagreements over the way Assange was running the operation, reported the Washington Post over the weekend. The paper cited Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old Icelandic activist who moderated a WikiLeaks chat room until about a month ago. “Quite a few others” who were more tangentially involved have also left, he said.

The story was repeated by the New York Times, which cites Assange’s “dwindling number of loyalists,” and wrote that “some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.”

Neither Assange himself nor spokespeople for Wikileaks responded to numerous requests for comment from FoxNews.com. But on Twitter, Assange categorically deniedthe New York Times report, stating that the article was “wrong from top to bottom.”

Articles on the revolt at Wikileaks nevertheless continued. U.K. paper the Telegraph went so far as to question Assange’s state of mind, following a weekend incident in which he walked off the set of a CNN interview

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/10/25/does-wikis-latest-docs-dump-staff-revolt/?test=latestnews

We have covered this before. I am not a fan of Wikileaks or what they are doing with classified government documents. I think that Assange is exactly what he is portrayed to be in this article: a narcissistic jerk who thinks that doing this makes him special. The biggest problem that I have with the actions around releasing all of these classified documents is that the reality is that it does put people’s lives in danger for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, the mere mention of someone’s name in a report that is released is enough to get that person killed. People who quietly help out forces ferret out hostiles, who reveal the locations of secret weapon caches, and things such as this stand a real likelihood of being executed by radicals once exposed. It also puts soldiers in a more dangerous situation, as the tactics and methods revealed allow the enemy to adapt and better prepare for our soldiers

I personally have gotten to the point with Assange where I believe he should be treated as a spy against the United States. They should arrest him and try him for accessing and distributing classified material. And if they cannot do that, go ahead and send Daniel Craig after him.

1. Indict Mr. Assange and his colleagues for espionage, regardless of whether he is presently in a U.S. jurisdiction, and ask our allies to do the same.
2. Explore opportunities for the president to designate WikiLeaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them.
3. Freeze the assets of the WikiLeaks organization and its supporters, and sanction financial organizations working with this terrorist-enabling organization so they cannot clear transactions denominated in U.S. dollars.
4. Give the new U.S. Cyber-Command a chance to prove its worth by ordering it to electronically assault WikiLeaks and any telecommunications company offering its services to this organization.
5. Holding meaningful congressional hearings to look into how this much classified information could ever be compromised and how the U.S. can better identify and combat political warfare organizations like WikiLeaks.”

Without the threat of exposure, government violence has no limit. It is in the dark that the fear, torture, and murder of innocent people occurs at the hands of government. They use dungeons for a reason.

I agree with you that there is no justification for hiding evil as well. To leak classified information is a gross injustice and should be punished severely. THe soldier that sold that information to Wiki should be in Leavenworth making little rocks out of big ones for life.

I am afraid that will be my stance, sir….where classified documents are concerned. That does not mean that it cannot be handled differently (and it can be and has in many instances)but if evil, indeed, has been done.

Now a question for you…..if the Wikileaks exposure of these documents leads to assissinations and murders of the sources and families have been mrdered….should Wikileaks be held repsonsible since it would be the direct result?

I say yes. Disclosing calssified documents that name individuals or companies or sources….you are as guilty as pulling the trigger yourself.

Ddefinition of the use of the term evil is paramount but your position is well known. I am on the other spectrum…Wikileaks is not only moderately accurate it is wrong in disclosing classified documents and any deaths or destruction as a result is the fault of Wikileaks and NOT the government for having a policy. Wikileaks takes a stance that can result in death by disclosure of information that it got illegally to start with….is more guilty of murder than even the worst policy of the government…and that is saying a lot because I do not trust government but I am not a traito either.

According to the Washington Post there are more than 1 million people with Top Secret clearance. I’d assume that Compartmentalized Top Secret would at least be somewhat less and for Secret clearance to be more. That’s a helluva lot of people with clearance. While I cannot find numbers – perhaps we can agree that the number of documents tagged as secret or above numbers in the hundreds of millions. Part of what that tells me is that maybe we have more secrets than we need, and of those secrets we have way too many people with access to them. I would offer that in any governmental system where you have hostile enemies there will be a need for SOME secrets so as not to place innocent lives at immediate risk. What we have today is the opposite.

Also – from an information security perspective – if “we” did not have this eclectic mix of white, gray and black hats that routinely expose insecure code, we’d be at the mercy of truly vicious criminals. Companies routinely and knowingly publish bad & insecure code because its too expensive (in their minds and maybe factually) to fix all of it up front. They fix usually only when caught and exposed.

I’d also suggest USW and D13 wise-up with respect to soldiers somehow being at higher/elevated risk because their names found their way into a document leaked on WIKI. A more plausible and realistic issue is that with journalists (embedded or no), a highly inter-connected social world where work and personal identities are blending into one, and easily accessible technology to keep everyone connected exists right on the battlefield – you’re merely a few mouse clicks or finger taps away from being able to easily identify a soldier, where he’s from, who his/her family/friends are, where he went to school, where he likes to eat, favorite music, pain and pleasure points, etc….. Am I making sense? Soldiers, from an information protection standpoint, are not well guarded or advised of what THEIR OWN HABITS expose them to – and we’re more worried about WIKI posting dated documents of some egregious shit we shouldn’t have done anyway (and thereby somehow exposing the guy on the battlefield)?

Hmm….right and wrong Ray…..I am not talking about the common soldier. I am talking about the source of intel. YOu are quite right about the number of secrets and there is entirely too much stamping of routine paperwork as eyes only or classified. If the information is stamped secret or top secret, it is meant for eyes only…however…truly top secret stuff is not available to the common soldier even with a TS….you still must have a need to know. I am referring mainly to the release of documents that are supposed to be safeguarded and it is beyond me why you or flag or anyone for that matter thinks it is ok to release such entrusted docs because there are things that, you and others, think should not be held secret. That is not the issue. The issue is the trust and release of data.

Flag wants to seperate from government and business and I see NO difference. If a company has a secret and its proprietary information is stolen and sold should be no different than government proprietary information being stolen and sold.

Why are you not outraged that Wikileaks paid for stolen information? Why is it ok for ANYONE to purchase stolen information?

That is my main thing.

FYT…..the Military is trying to make soldiers understand that the social networks are not good places to be.

Reminds me of the changing of the serial numbers to the ss number and putting them on dog tags….in VIetnam, the NOrt Vietnamese would take the dog tags and trace them and then contact families. Pschyops at its best.

D13 – what is the larger point? The reports on the so-called Iraq War Logs are indicative that the systematic preventive, detective and monitoring controls that are supposed to be in place have failed multiple times. Over-reliance is placed on a military system to self-report and self-audit – the results of these activities stamped secret to intentionally preclude any external assessment of the appropriateness of action and efficacy of controls. Does that not strike you as bizarre?

The argument comes down to this in my mind – do we blindly maintain a system of operational secrecy for the sake of secrecy or do we acknowledge that periodically peeling back the curtain and shining a light is a necessary element of ensuring that we operate militarily with integrity, honesty, and with the trust granted to military leaders by stakeholders domestic and foreign? I find your position herein at near complete odds with the situation on the Texas border where there is a complete blackout of information.

We learn from our mistakes by shining an uncomfortable light on them not by insisting that they remain covered up.

Ray…will you say the same about banks and lending practices? Will you say the same about companies and product standards? Will you say the same about hospitals and patient practices? Peel back the layers on all these to shine a light inside?

IS it then feasible to look into your bank account to see your spending practices? Are you buying pornography or drugs?

I have to come down on the side of secrecy for secrecy’s sake and rely on internal monitoring.

I dont see how you can argue no secrecy for military and not argue no secrecy for practices in the private side that disrupt lives and cause greater issues than what goes on in Iraq or Afghanistan on a limited basis. Water boarding prisoners, for example, does not rise to the harm and effect that Madoff did or Bareny Frank and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae….does not rise to that at all. Far more lives and innocent people were affected here and more detrimentally, in my opinion.

On the border, there are things that we are doing to get the word out but you will never see me do a hidden camera or hidden microphone.

It also does not stop at government…ik it is ok to leak classified government documents…it is ok to leak and and release bank documents to the public of your bank accounts or medical documents….wherein lies the difference?

After working for the same railroad for 14 years, never missing a house or car payment, Sammy Bailey says he never expected his credit score to keep him out of a job. But after being laid off in March 2009, he soon found himself unable to make payments on his house and his car, and his credit took a big hit.

“My house payment was $800 a month and my truck was $665 a month, and I was only making about $1200 a month on unemployment,” Bailey, 42, told HuffPost. “I couldn’t afford to keep up with the payments, lost both the house and the car, and that’s what caused my credit score to go down.”

Bailey said he applied for a new job at Am-Rail in Kansas City, Missouri, three weeks ago but failed to pass the background check because of his poor credit.

“When they run a credit report on you, I guess the score is supposed to determine what kind of employee you are,” he said. “I’ve had very few jobs in my lifetime, and every job I’ve had I stuck with for a very long time. Seems like they should go off of you, not your credit score.”

While the credit check has always been a routine part of the job application process, experts are wondering whether it’s still a fair screening tool in the wake of a recession that has left 15 million Americans unemployed and unable to keep up with their bills.

In a meeting of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission last week to discuss the use of credit history as a discriminatory barrier to employment, a panel of legal experts and social scientists explained how the screening practice may be harmful and unfair to American workers.

“A simple reason to oppose the use of credit history for job applications is the sheer, profound absurdity of the practice,” said Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. “Using credit history creates a grotesque conundrum. Simply put, a worker who loses her job is likely to fall behind on paying her bills due to lack of income. With the increasing use of credit reports, this worker now finds herself shut out of the job market because she’s behind on her bills. This phenomenon has created concerns that the unemployed and debt-ridden could form a luckless class.”

According to a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 60 percent of all organizations polled said they conducted background checks on applicants, and 17 percent in the Northeast reported that favorable background check results are the most important factor influencing the final decision of whether to hire someone.

Considering the fact that more than half of all working adults in America have either been unemployed, taken a pay cut, had their work hours reduced or become involuntary part-time workers since the beginning of the recession, more and more job applicants are hampered by blemishes on their credit reports in the search for a steady salary.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/25/credit-checks-keep-the-jo_n_773754.html

This is a story that actually hits a little close to home for me. I have been a hiring/firing manager for the last 11 years. Over the last five or six, this has become an increasingly frequent occurence. I interview candidates. They are rock stars in the interview. I know they are the perfect fit for what I am trying to get from that position. I input their information into the database for a background check. Employment history: Good. Criminal history: Good. Credit history: Uh oh. Wait a minute. I have lost more qualified and dynamic potential employees because they came back with one of the three major bureaus awarding a less than stellar credit score. The candidate is informed that they are no longer offered employment.

As someone who once found himself on the short end of credit scores. I find this abhorrent. When I went through a divorce, my ex-wife had left me in a deep financial hole. I had been deployed for a full year. I returned home to find that she had paid no bills, nothing, for the entire year. She was spending it all on her new boyfriend. I ignorantly didn’t believe in filing for bankruptcy. I vowed to pay every dime owed in my name. It took me ten years to do so. My credit score absolutely plummetted. I eventually recovered and got my score back above 700, but it took time and hard work.

I was a hard working guy. Pretty smart, dedicated, and reliable. I have an excellent set of skills that make me a great candidate for any position. I was always a quality employee and I never screwed anyone over. It may suck, but I gave my all no matter what job I was assigned. Yet if my company had the credit requirement in place when I joined my organization, I would have been ruled ineligible. That’s right, the job where I became a star, where I won numerous awards and became one of the best at what I do, was one that I wouldn’t have even gotten in the first place had I been forced to submit to a background check that included credit history.

And now we see that these credit histories are further blocking the path forward for many Americans who are down on their luck because of the mess the federal government made of our economy. And I have to ask how this is fair. I get that there are certain jobs where this may be relevant. Working at a bank for example. But for retail positions? Dock workers? Working at a railroad? It is ludicrous to believe that someone’s credit score tells you much of anything about what type of employee they would be. Isn’t that what the interview and work history are supposed to tell you?

I have major problems with the fact that credit history is used in background checks for employment. First, this economy sucks. Which means a whole lot of people are taking hits to their credit score while doing everything they can to keep their head above water. But more important, have any of you ever tried to deal with the credit agencies? Finding out what is on your credit history is not an easy process. Attempting to get it fixed is even harder. One of the things I learned in doing so was that while creditors are quick to report you for missing a payment, they very often don’t report to the agencies when you pay off an account or catch back up on missed payments. It once took me two years to get something removed from a credit report that was not even me. I had never had any account with the creditor in question. I had perfect credit on my house mortgage, credit cards, car payment, yet they believed I had defaulted on some rent to own furniture!

So these credit reports are not really all that accurate in many cases. They are not a fair assessment of a person’s character or of their future work performance. Given the sad state of the economy and the high unemployment, how can it be fair to judge people based on some arbitrary score from a company that has never spoken to you or informed you of what is reported. Is there a solution to this problem?

My personal belief is that the credit agencies and their scores are a scam meant to enable companies to take advantage of consumers. You can’t argue your credit score with someone you apply to get credit from so you are forced to accept the resulting interest rates based on whatever score that agency spits out. Is there a solution to this part of the problem?

We agree again, USW. It is obscene that “credit scores” are used to preclude employment. The solution is regulation aimed at removing this practice from the books with stiff enough penalties (not slaps on the wrist) for those who continue to use credit scores as a factor for employment that they are bullied away from doing so (i.e., like paying those they turn away a year or two full salary for the positions they applied for).

Doesn’t everytime your credit score looked up get your credit score lowered if it happens several times in a short amount of time? So if someone that is looking for a job get three employers to look up their credit score then it gets docked.

Yes sir…and one other problem…..I have no credit cards, no mortgage and no car payment. All I have is utilities…..check my credit and it is 0…..and shows no credit. So, if you have cash, no debt, and want credit…you cannot get it. I have run into a couple of problems with having no credit history in over 15 years because I am a cash customer and credit history is sometimes used in title applications and other things non mercantile related.

D13,
I find it interesting when people don’t use credit cards. I put almost everything on a credit card. $1500-$2000 a month. I pay the bill in full every month – never pay any interest.

This means I get a free $1500-$2000 loan from the banks every month. I also use a “cash back” card so I get a check for $250 once or twice a year! And this gives me a stellar credit score – 840 the last time I got a loan.

If you’re not using credit cards wisely, you’re not playing the game right! 😉

I certainly understand and many people do exactly as you do…however, when I run my numbers, I can make more on my money by paying cash than I can by deferring cash. At any rate, I prefer to be debt free (even short term debt)and my financial statement shows no short term nor long term liability. If I need a large influx of cash, I can go to a bank. A financial statement that shows no long or short term debt, gives me a debt to equity ratio that banks love. I can use a debit card as a credit card on ocassion but for terms of large loans…..I do not need a credit rating….I need a strong financial statement with free and clear assets.

It is just ironic that a car loan or a mortgage loan could care less about a financial statement…they want that credit history number. I guess because the majority of the population isn ot debt free and the banks and finacning agencies do not want someone who payd everything off…they want a payment system. I just recentrly bought a new car and negotiated a cash price with discounts that surpasses any loan but it was sure funny that even though I got a lower price for the car by paying cash….they still tried to get me to finance the lower price….as you know, if you study the use of money…wise use of credit and cash saves a boatload.

I had perfect credit my whole life. I paid every dollar of every bill in full and on time.

Then I moved out early from an apartment I was renting. I paid the break-lease fee. I paid the two extra months that the lease required me to. I was done.

Then they sent me a bill for rent. I called them up, told them that I didn’t owe them rent, that I terminated pursuant to the lease. They said I still owed them. I had a lawyer call them.

Then they send me another bill for the next month. And another for the one after. And they never returned my security deposit. So they wanted me to pay for three months that I wasn’t living there after I had already ended the lease when, if anything, they owed me a month for security.

I had my lawyer threaten them and they left me alone.

Then I got a call from a debt collector.

The debt collector was not interested in what I owed didn’t owe. They wanted the money and threatened me with my credit. I begged, argued, threatened, rationalized, yelled, debated for hours but I got nowhere. They wanted three month’s rent that I didn’t owe or they were going to report to the credit agencies that I’m a deadbeat.

Eventually, I thought I made headway and they agreed that I probably didn’t owe the money and they stopped calling me.

A year later, I went to buy my home. And there, in my report, was an item claiming failure to pay rent. The mortgage company wouldn’t give me a loan until I resolved the issue.

Ultimately, I wound up paying every penny and still losing 75 points off my score.

6 years ago my brother-in-law gave me his 1 year old cell phone from Sprint. I thought well, I will save money already having a phone and go with Sprint. I contacted Sprint and they activated my service. It should be noted that I had in writing a cancel clause of 7 business days. Later that day the battery went dead and wouldn’t take a charge. I called sprint and they told me I had to go to Radio Shack for a new battery. The battery was $179.00…screw that. I read my agreement, called Sprint, within 2 days of initiating the contract and cancelled. They did not give me any problem.

1 month later I got a bill for $45.00. I called and bitched, but quickly decided to pay the bill and be done with it. 6 months late I got a call from a collector wanting the $45.00 owed to Sprint. I faxed him a copy of the check and thought that was that. 6 months later another collector and same story. Then I started getting monthly invoices from Sprint with balance due. To make a longer story short, I paid the $45.00 balance 3 seperate times and I have the cancelled checks to prove it, but the debt is still on my credit report. I have written the CEO of Sprint, no result, and I submitted a letter of explination to all 3 credit agencies, but it is still there.

The whole system is a sham.

And BTW: Sprint could never ever regain my business no matter what they did. The company sucks and I pray they go bottom up

Just like any wireless service, (I am and have been in this business for 20+ years) reception in and of itself, depends on your relative location with regard to the nearest cell site. Sprint (most likely) has a site near where you are, and AT&T’s site is most likely further.

Tell me.. since you’ve been in the industry for 20 years.. since everyone who has an iPhone hates AT&T and will mass-exodus as soon as the Verizon iPhone become available, will my AT&T service improve once they’re gone to the point that it’s not worth leaving with them?

It is possible that will happen…data usage for AT&T has increased around 5000% since the IPhone became available. The growth is extremely hard to keep up with, but the AT&T network is much faster than any other out there, so the IPhone performance will be somewhat diminished on another carriers system. I personally believe that a mass exodus will not occur, but if it does, it will surely overload other carriers until they can catch up with increased capacity.

The fact is that, as a general rule of thumb, and my and Wep’s stories above not withstanding, poor credit is generally indicative of poor personal responsibility.

Yes, the agencies should be more responsive, the appeals process should be better, the you should have better access to your data, etc, etc.

HOWEVER, if the employers think it’s relevant, then they should review it. And if the recession destroys enough people’s credit, then credit will stop being indicative of personal responsibility and thus employers will stop looking at it.

That said, I do find it invasive, but I guess it’s no worse than the kinds of questions they ask in interviews..

1 – When denied a job due to your credit score the prospective employer gives you the opportunity to sit down and go over what it is that caused you not to meet their standards.

2 – If credit reporting agencies had a reasonable appeals process you could use for dispute resolution and improvement of your score with that reporting agency.

3 – If there was a standard for credit scoring. This stupidity that because my score is checked it then takes a hit and goes down is crap. In today’s economy those looking for work hard, filling out several applications, and having several credit checks run take hits on their score because they are being checked for non-credit approval purposes is – IMO – extremely prejudicial and unfair.

3 – If companies/business making reports to credit reporting agencies had mandatory reporting requirements for all transactions resolved (I still have one that three years after resolution has been updated by the original reporter with the credit reporting agencies – and no amount of proof from me has satisfied the credit reporting agency yet).

4 – If your credit history had something materially to do with the job being applied for. Many companies look at nothing more than the number, and that number alone is – IMHO – insufficient to determine the quality of the prospective employee.

In others word – make the danged system fair and I would agree. Otherwise, just another way people get screwed over unnecessarily.

Careful a bit good sir, don’t confuse me with an absolutely no government libertarian – you’ll be disappointed.

I’m not the brightest bulb when it comes to the whole world of economics, so honestly as of yet – I couldn’t say I’m for a completely free market any more than a heavily regulated market. It’s difficult but there must be some balance in their somewhere – I’m just not educated enough to figure out where that line is (and from the battles over the years neither are the “experts”).

What I’d be advocating for is a reform of the system of credit scores/credit reporting – whether that be accomplished best by the free market or limited governmental intrusion is open for debate.

Many, many moons ago, when I got my job at my current company which is one of the largest financial institutions, they performed credit checks on all employees. There were two reasons for this:

1. As an employee at a financial institution, you must be bonded. My understanding is that to be bonded, you must have good credit which may be explained by #2.

2. It was explained to me that if you had poor finances, you may be tempted to embezzle from the cookie jar, which can be done in various ways such as manipulating systems, shorting customers at the branches, etc.

2. I was also told that if an employee is unable to “care” for his/her own finances, then how can said employee effectively “care” for a customer’s finances.

The Credit Rating system works perfectly for those who created it and use it. It does provide a quick and easy way to separate out the truly unqualified, and it gives companies and banks leverage to get favorable terms – higher interest rates on loans, etc – from people that are qualified but may have had a problem or two in the past. They have no incentive to correct errors, because that would favor you, not them.

And the system created another revenue stream for them – all the credit protection and restoration services that are offered. What not to love about this system?????

This system does not affect their personal lives, because the system is designed to benefit those who already have significant assets. There are easy ways to ‘game’ the system if you know how and have the resources.

It’s a great example of a system created by the free market. Do we really want all of our systems created like this?

There are a couple of reasons. We have every bit of trouble here as I have been reporting…even more than Arizona. First of all, we are not getting very much Federal Aid at all. We also have the largest Reserve (National Guard) of all the states including California. We have the right to deploy on our border and have done so. The POTUS cannot stop us at all unless he cares to federally activate the Emergency War Powers Act to take control of the guard. Our guard is NOT federally funded. It is funded from State revenues and it is in our budget. Arizona has no such force so it relies on sheriffs and local law enforcement.

Secondly, we have empowered our ranchers and made them part of our force. They are a great set of eyes and provide great intelligence. They are also bolstered by state law on trespassing and can use deadly force to protect their lands and have no…repeat…no rules of engagement. Our state guard has no such rules of engagement and report directly to the Governor. We have activated 3,000 combat troops and are actively patrolling our own borders with drones, helicopters, tanks, personnel carriers, etc. Our troops are armed with live ammunition. In addition, private lands in Texas run right up to the border and the border is NOT federal land except the Rio itself. In Arizona, most of the border area is Federal. Since the land is private, the Texas Guard has reached agreement with the ranchers that allow the guard to perform “training” on their land. So, instead of training at Fort Hood, our guard now trains on the border in actual situations. We train the ranchers right along with our guard and they become proficient in radio and electronic procedures and we equip the ranchers with same….and done with STATE funds and not Federal. We have equipped our ranchers with up to date and modern weapons and show them how to uase them. When the Cartels engage on our border, they are engaging military now (except the border cities), enaging ranchers that are becoming military trained, and they know we fire back. We have had 24 deadly engagements on the TExas side this year. You will not see it on the radio or tv…there is a news blackout ordered by the WH.

Third, Texas already had laws on the books. We are simply enforcing our laws. Arizona just passed the same laws that we have had and it is easier to challenge a new law than it is to come into Texas and challenge laws already on the books for decades.

Fourth, I fully believe with all my heart, that Obama knows that if he pushes Texas, we will and can push back…..economically especially. I also believes that he feels, as do many in Congress, that Texas has the guts and the will to push back to Republic status. Now, there are a lot on this blog that will say Texas cannot do that and that the POTUS will send in Federal troops to stop any such try but I would not bet on it. I would not under estimate Texas at all. Do not think for a minute that our legislature would not vote for it….they will.

Fifth, the cartels are in the news constantly about Texas but across the border in Mexico. They do not have a foothold in Texas like they do on Federally owned lands in Arizona. Our Big Bend area is leased to the Feds. We are the only state that can do that and we retained the right to our land. Less that 2 percent of the land in Texas is Federal and that pertains to only the military bases. The Cartels are destroying the border ON THE MEXICO SIDE but they are not coming across to the Texas side because of our military. We literally watch executions on a weekly basis on the Mexico side. The cartel members drag people down to the Rio all the time and simply shoot them in the head and throw them in the Rio. AS long as they are on the Mexico side, we do nothing. They simply wave at us. Mexico forbids any interdiction on our part.

Today…this very day, the cartels now control one half of Nuevo Laredo. They have literally blocked off streets and are openly engaging the Federales. Reynosa, across from McAllen is also controlled and the police are killed all the time. There have been over 3,000 deaths on the Mexico side of the Texas border this year and 48 on the Texas side but we have exacted a very high toll on the cartel so they are going to Arizona and California.

Gov Perry has basically told the US justice dept to back off and leave us alone. And they are and I fully believe that it has to do with our independent stances and the will to do it.

Just what D13 has written. I think the President has some emergency war powers, but without a declared war or emergency, I don’t think it can be legal. They could request
the media to withhold reporting.

Buck….here is how it works. First of all, there is no news media out in the countryside. They are not allowed to be imbedded with our guard. When I can, I do not allow news media around. I did not allow it in Vietnamn, Kuwait, nor Iraq with my units. (It was a commanders decision). They never report it correct anyway.

Second, in the comaanders briefing and in the intel briefings….we are specifically told to not provide any type of news or information to any reporter for fear of being relieved of command. We are told that if any news media show up to immediately escort them from the scene.

It is common knowledge that offocers will relieved of command should any information be given out about the border. Anyone whom contacts the media will be relieved of command.

On the eve of the Major League Baseball World Series, I wanted to offer some thoughts and ask everyone’s predictions. I was reading through the comments after JAC’s post yesterday about it. Very cool that you stole home (almost) on a televised game JAC. I have also been on TV playing ball in the past. In the early and mid-90’s I was a pretty good player while in the military. I played on a team ranked #1 in the Southeast. We played several big tournaments that ended up having local television coverage. I actually pitched two complete game wins on local television in Macon, Georgia and in Louisiana. It was pretty cool, but I didn’t have family watching as there were no family members local! I have the second game somewhere packed away on a VHS tape that I am sure is probably no good anymore.

As for the series. I am rooting for the Rangers simply because they have never won before. I love seeing cities get their first taste of a championship. That and the fact that I simply don’t like SanFrancisco all that much.

I predict that the Rangers will win in 6 games. Cliff Lee will out-duel Tim Lincecum. I think that the pitching star for San Francisco will end up being Matt Cain. I think that the Rangers have enough offensively to deal with the Giants. But I did also think the same of the Phillies. I was fairly sure that the Phillies would win the NLCS going into it. As a Red Sox fan I didn’t care who won the AL as long as it wasn’t the Yankees, lol. At the start of the playoffs, I silently hoped to have this matchup for the Series. I just liked having some teams there that haven’t been in a while, or in the Ranger’s case…. ever.

So there is my prediction. Rangers are the Champions with a 4 games to two series victory.

The World Series has become yet another tournament of which I have zero interest anymore. I remember running home from school, totally excited, to watch Bob Gibson pitch against Denny McLain … back when the best teams in each league played one another for the championship. I refuse to call it anything more than what it is and rarely watch it anymore. The 2nd and 4th best team from each league is in the final stage of the tournament and I could care less. The regular season means squat (so why put us through it?) … they can pick the teams from a hat and get similar results. The schedules are horrendous and the game (much like football is becoming–with all the chest beating after a single play–completely abhorrent to me.

Hey USW….I am not a big baseball fan but go Rangers….I am actually for any team that beats the best teams that money can buy. There is no competition if you buy your World Series and that is what a lot of teams do. Yankees for one. Anyone that beats the Yankess is ok in my book……Especially if you go in their house and take 2 of 3…I see where there are two players on the Yankees whose combined salary is greater than that of the entire Rangers team….

This is also why people are losing interest in baseball. Buy your team…buy your World Series….so GO RANGERS…

Amen D13…I didn’t think they (Rangers) could do it, but thankfully they have proved me wrong! I am not much an American League fan because of the DH rule, but am definitely pulling for the Rangers to take it all!

D13, you got that right! As a Mets fan (it hurts to admit it–but I only liked baseball prior to those fugazy divisions they created for television revnue), I hate the Skankies and love when they spend $210 million to lose in the tournament. Go anybody but the Skankies … except I won’t watch it anyway.

Baseball’s playoffs have a serious problem in that they have scheduled games in NOVEMBER! This is not about baseball anymore it is about money. They wait to start the season on a Monday this year because they started the season with one game on Sunday April 4th. Why did the season not start on Friday April 2nd? Because the NCAA final four started on Saturday and they didn’t want the competition in viewership because the start and the end of the baseball season is all about money. Look at the nonsense that they have in the playoffs. The season ended on Sunday October 3rd. A days rest and a five game series with one travel day should be done by Sunday the 10th. Give them a days rest and a 7 game series with two travel days should be over by Wednesday the 20th. Give them a days rest and a 7 game series with two travel days should be over by Saturday the 30th. That is if every series goes the maximum number of games (that is even with starting the season 3 or 4 days after they should have). If they didn’t go the maximum number of days the series should move up a day for each game the series is shortened. But the end of each series was on the 12th, the 23rd and if it goes 7 games November 4th!

Come on you guys it’s the World Series! Don’t any of you remember walking into your first Major League stadium with your father, smelling the popcorn, and being awed by being that close to your childhood idols?

I remember my Dad pulling up to Busch stadium when my brother and I were young, buying 4 tickets 7 rows back from third base on a lovely sunny day. It was the very first major league game I ever saw and it was a double header, and I got to watch the great one, Bob Gibson, pitch. Jeepers, what a thrill. Both my brother and I sat there with hot dogs, cracker jack and coke, grinning ear to ear.

I know that baseball is riddled with greed, and it has gotten expensive, but it’s still baseball and it is the “World Series”

I suggest you forget about the BS and remember how it was when you were a kid.

My old man took me to see his favorite team (from when they were the New York Giants and played at the Polo Grounds) … $3.50 for box seats … I LOVED baseball back in the day … now it’s a sad and bad joke on anybody who isn’t there in corporate seats. You couldn’t give me tickets to any game (including this dopey tournament they run) … it’s a horror story. Some of these clowns can do whatever they want (trot instead of run out ground balls, potential doubles, etc.) because they make too much for managers to bench them. The prices they charge at stadiums today is beyond absurd. No thanks, keep the tournament, I’d rather watch Honeymooner reruns.

A new law proposal called The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced last week, and there will be a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee this Thursday.

If passed, this law will allow the government, under the command of the media companies, to censor the internet as they see fit, like China and Iran do, with the difference that the sites they decide to censor will be completely removed from the internet and not just in the US.

The following article is from the HuffPo no less…

Stop the Internet Blacklist

By David Segal and Aaron Swartz

When it really matters to them, Congressmembers can come together — with a panache and wry wit you didn’t know they had. As banned books week gets underway, and President Obama admonishes oppressive regimes for their censorship of the Internet, a group of powerful Senators — Republicans and Democrats alike — have signed onto a bill that would vastly expand the government’s power to censor the Internet.

The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) was introduced just one week ago, but it’s greased and ready to move, with a hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee this Thursday. If people don’t speak out, US citizens could soon find themselves joining Iranians and Chinese in being blocked from accessing broad chunks of the public Internet.

Help us stop this bill in its tracks! Click here to sign our petition.

COICA creates two blacklists of Internet domain names. Courts could add sites to the first list; the Attorney General would have control over the second. Internet service providers and others (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the good favor of the government) if they block domains on the second list.

The lists are for sites “dedicated to infringing activity,” but that’s defined very broadly — any domain name where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are “central to the activity of the Internet site” could be blocked.

One example of what this means in practice: sites like YouTube could be censored in the US. Copyright holders like Viacom often argue copyrighted material is central to the activity of YouTube, but under current US law, YouTube is perfectly legal as long as they take down copyrighted material when they’re informed about it — which is why Viacom lost to YouTube in court.

But if COICA passes, Viacom wouldn’t even need to prove YouTube is doing anything illegal to get it shut down — as long as they can persuade the courts that enough other people are using it for copyright infringement, the whole site could be censored.

Perhaps even more disturbing: Even if Viacom couldn’t get a court to compel censorship of a YouTube or a similar site, the DOJ could put it on the second blacklist and encourage ISPs to block it even without a court order. (ISPs have ample reason to abide the will of the powerful DOJ, even if the law doesn’t formally require them to do so.)

COICA’s passage would be a tremendous blow to free speech on the Internet — and likely a first step towards much broader online censorship. Please help us fight back: The first step is signing our petition. We’ll give you the tools to share it with your friends and call your Senator.

The mainstream media has become a hi-jacked propoganda machine for the American government and now “they” want to take away the last open bastion we have to unbiased media!

It seems since “they” know that the population has not swallowed their liberal progressive drivel with the overwhelming lack of support the population has shown for their global warming cap -n- trade green energy job killing bullshit and Obamacares hidden taxes becoming common knowledge…well I actually think it safe to say the entire liberal progressive agenda, they are now trying to put our eyes out with red hot needles!

Concerning the incident at the Rand Paul debate yesterday…the individual who was “stomped” on…

Rand Paul Protestor Previously Arrested For Vandalizing Ship At Fourchon
Before last night’s U.S. Senate campaign debate in Kentucky between Rand Paul and Jack Conway, a fracas ensued when a left-wing activist approached Paul wearing a blond wig and carrying an anti-Paul sign. The activist accosted the Republican candidate, upon which she was wrestled to the ground and had her head stepped on by some overzealous and hypersensitive Paul supporters.

Interestingly enough, the activist – whose name is Lauren Valle – seems to have spent some time in Louisiana earlier this year. And Valle picked up a citation for rather uncivil conduct during her stay in the Sportsman’s Paradise.

Sheriff Craig Webre and Harbor Police Chief John Callais announced the arrest of seven Greenpeace activists in Port Fourchon. A complaint came in at approximately 12:45 PM stating the seven had boarded a vessel at Port Fourchon and painted messages with an unknown substance on different areas of the ship. The messages were directed to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. A representative for Salazar was at Port Fourchon this morning while other dignitaries congregated in Galliano with Secretary Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano regarding the ongoing oil spill impacting the Louisiana coastline. Those arrested were:

The seven had been seen in the area for the past week and had been repeatedly warned by law enforcement not to hamper clean up operations and not to trespass. Greenpeace is known for pre-planning and coordinating similar protests to bring attention to environmental issues. Pictures of the vandalism appeared on the Greenpeace website within minutes of the arrest of the activists.

All seven will be transported to the Lafourche Parish Detention Center where they will be booked with unauthorized entry of a critical infrastructure (R.S. 14:62.3) and unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling (R.S. 14:62.3). The New Orleans Joint Terrorism Taskforce is reviewing today’s incident and all seven could face additional charges.

(Hat tip: Robert Stacy McCain, via Gateway Pundit)

Valle, it seems, has been involved in separate incidents involving both Greenpeace and MoveOn.org. That’s a good indication she’s a member of the Professional Left. The purpose of her presence at the Paul-Conway debate, in fact, was to present Paul with an “employee of the month award” from Republicorp, a fictional company created by MoveOn.org in an attempt to dramatize how the GOP has merged with American corporate interests. The New York Daily News reports Valle, a 23-year old Columbia religion graduate, was hired by MoveOn.org for three weeks to work on the “Republicorp” project in Kentucky; it can only be assumed her role was to follow Paul around and attempt to embarrass him.

The “Republicorp” project has attempted to embarrass other GOP figures, like for example Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal as he visited Wisconsin in support of senate candidate Ron Johnson:

The scene outside the debate was described as chaotic, and Valle was one of several protestors who were described as disruptive at the event.

Which does not excuse the men responsible for wrestling her to the ground and using a foot to pin her head to the pavement. They gave Valle precisely the publicity she was looking for.

Now don’t tell me she is some innocent…she knew perfectly well what she was getting in to, and the possible ramifications of her actions…

Also, while the scene may have been described as ‘chaotic’, it did not seem so from the video. And, based on the video, this was not some guy using ‘a foot to pin her head to the pavement’ – it looked to me like a pretty hard push to the head/shoulder which did result in a concussion.

All I have read on this indicates she claims pain in her neck, shoulder and head. Have not seen anything about a concussion except from you. Paul has denounced his supporter. Were you as outraged by the SEIU?

SEIU and partisan hacks like Media Matters have tried to spin away the Gladney beating. They would have you believe a 130 lb diabetic, recovering luekemia patient, picked a fight with men almost twice his size. The police report puts an end to that lie.

The police report is unambiguous about what happened on August 6th in St. Louis. The White House, through SEIU, did indeed ‘punch back twice as hard.’ What is ambiguous, however, is why prosecutors haven’t pursued the charges against SEIU. As you will learn, there is a lot to suggest that Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis DA, is trying to cover-up SEIU’s crime

Not as familiar as the Gladney attack, but if it happened as you describe, then yes, I would condemn those involved. Media Matters though, from my brief search, is not attacking the victim in that case, but condemning Breitbart for his baseless attacks on the White House and SEIU – a huge difference.

Regardless of the extent of Valle’s injuries (from reports I heard yesterday she had suffered a concussion), can we agree that it is just completely inappropriate to blame the victim?

“can we agree that it is just completely inappropriate to blame the victim?”
Doubtful. You say victim, but leave out the activist part. She engaged in behavior that prompted a response, and bears responsibility for her actions. I think the guy who first grabbed her acted properly, the second guy, I think when too far.

There is a Mr. Bean movie, where he goes through an airport, and plays like his hand is a gun hidden in his jacket. Security chases and tackles him.

I also think you have worded your remarks with a slant like MM would. Concussion for “said her face was swollen and her neck and shoulder were sore”

Rand Paul Supporter Involved in Scuffle Also a

Major Campaign Donor

Published October 26, 2010

| FoxNews.com

Senate candidate Rand Paul is seen with volunteer Tim Profitt in a photo distributed by Rand’s opponent after Profitt was caught on video stepping on the head of a liberal activist. The Paul campaign says the photo was taken in January.

Senate candidate Rand Paul is seen with volunteer Tim Profitt in a photo distributed by Rand’s opponent after Profitt was caught on video stepping on the head of a liberal activist. The Paul campaign says the photo was taken in January.

The volunteer with Rand Paul’s U.S. Senate campaign who was caught on video stepping on the head of a liberal activist and pinning her face to the concrete is also a major donor to the Kentucky Republican.

Tim Profitt gave the Paul campaign $1,900, according to a review of Federal Election Commission records. A review of FEC records also shows a woman with the same last name and same address donated at least $500.

Paul’s campaign dropped Profitt as campaign coordinator in Bourbon County, in central Kentucky, and banned him from future events. But Paul’s campaign has not said whether it will return the donations.

Profitt apologized Tuesday for his role in the scuffle.

“I’m sorry that it came to that, and I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand’s safety,” Profitt said, adding that it was not as bad as it looked on video and blamed police for not intervening.

Oct. 25, 2010: Image taken from video and released by WDRB/Louisville, Lauren Valle of liberal group MoveOn.org, seen in red, is held on the ground by supporters of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul as she tries to confront the candidate, in Lexington Ky., after Paul and Democratic opponent Jack Conway debated.

Oct. 25, 2010: Image taken from video and released by WDRB/Louisville, Lauren Valle of liberal group MoveOn.org, seen in red, is held on the ground by supporters of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul as she tries to confront the candidate, in Lexington Ky., after Paul and Democratic opponent Jack Conway debated.

A judge will decide whether Profitt should face criminal charges.

Lauren Valle, the 23-year-old activist with the group MoveOn.org, said her face was swollen and her neck and shoulder were sore after she was wrestled to the ground by Paul supporters Monday night before a debate between the Tea Party loyalist and Democrat Jack Conway.

Valle was roughed up as she tried to give Paul a fake “employee of the month” award. She told police she was assaulted while trying to take a picture with Paul.

The race is one of the most closely watched and hotly contested in the midterm elections.

“I think that this is an extreme example of the kinds of sentiments that people are feeling in many races across the country,” Valle said. “I think that tension is incredibly high.”

Lexington Division of Police spokeswoman Sherelle Roberts said Tuesday that officers will deliver a summons to Profitt to appear in court. A judge will determine whether to proceed with an assault case.

Profitt said the fight never would have occurred if police officers had intervened earlier.

“A friend of mine went up to three policeman before Rand got there, and told them about the girl who was standing there with that wig on and that she was getting ready to do something,” Profitt said. “The policemen looked at him and said that’s not our job.”

Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton said Profitt’s actions were unacceptable and would not be tolerated.

“The Paul campaign has disassociated itself with the individual who took part in this incident, and once again urges all activists — on both sides — to remember that their political passions should never manifest themselves in physical altercations of any kind.”

Paul’s campaign called the altercation “incredibly unfortunate” and expressed relief that the woman was not injured.

Conway said he was shocked to see the video footage.

“We can disagree on issues, and I don’t know what preceded the incident, but physical violence by a man against a woman must never be tolerated,” Conway said in a statement. “It is my hope that steps have been taken to ensure this kind of thuggish behavior never happens again in this campaign.”

Victim? Only in the loosest sense of the word…IMO. If someone continues to play with fire, they will eventually get burned. And I did not see anything done to her that would cause a concussion…call me heartless, but that is how I see it.

In what way is Valle not a victim? You had a group of guys chase her around a car, grab her, throw her to the ground, and then (while she was already being ‘detained’), someone stomped on her head/shoulders. This is ‘no big deal’ to you?

Nope…she injected herself into the situation. If she has such a need to protest, let her do it with her vote, or encourage like minded folks to do the same. If there are legal ramifications that eminate from the guy’s actions, then so be it as well…he also should have known better, and that his actions are exactly what this woman was trying to elicit…again, IMO.

Wow, these stories just have wings-when was she chased around a car-and I keep looking at this video and I do not see a stomping of the head. A rough push on the shoulder. My opinion-the woman came meaning to cause trouble-she succeeded-the man who pushed her with his foot- crossed the line and he will and should get into trouble-just not a whole lot.

I see a 33 second video that shows a canadate for the US house of representing. At 8 seconds into the video someone is pushing through the crowd towards the canidate. At 13 seconds I see bystanders reacting to stop a threat and a blonde wig that the person was wearing flying around. At 17 seconds I see that person continuing to struggle when someone first says “get the cops”. At 18 seconds I see the person taken to the ground by two men. At 24 seconds I see two things. The man that did not fall on top of the person goes to step on the shoulder and the man that fell on top of the person gets up. After the man gets up no one holds the person down for the remainder of the video. At 25 seconds as the foot is pushing down I see someone step into the video saying “no no no no no no”

I do not see the victim after the first few seconds of the video, after that there is only two people that are both in the wrong.

She should. She was down. Even if she had been a threat, she wasn’t a threat anymore. She was on the ground and someone put their foot on her and pushed down. Call that a stomp, call it a step, say it’s the head, shoulder, or neck. It doesn’t matter.

It’s assault.

If she had been arrested by the police and they had her down on the ground like that – subdued – and had stepped on her, you’d be screaming for their badges.

Not sure where this comes from??? If I push my way through a crowd to shove something in your face, then you have that right to defend yourself. Your last post makes 0 sense to me…care to explain to this slow mind?

Buck…just out on the tv…a full video that led up to the incident….it clearly show Paul driving up to the debate and this woman CHARGES the open window and tries to shove the sign into the car. A security agent first pushed her back and then others took over. I would think that charging the car and breaking through a line…..should be a pretty good factor….she is NOT a victim…she was wrong.

She should be lucky she was not shot for rushing an open window car like that. She did not walk up to it and wave a sign…she rushed it and tried to shove it through the window…she also broke through line of folks to do it.

I don’t see anything here to support her side of the story, and it definitely seems she was out of line (I saw that RP had to move his head when she was waving the sign in his face), so I don’t begrudge the crowd for dragging her back from the car. That is all the video shows.

Now, it’s possible, possible that after the camera left, they chased her around the car or whatever, but I do think that’s moot. It is also possible that, prior to or after the filming, they bodily blocked her to prevent her from getting through (though if afterward, I’d say they were justified given her previous actions). I see no evidence for this either. But it’s also moot either way. She was definitely out of line running up to his car and sticking her sign in his face. Period.

That said, as I have said all along, once subdued, however, they had no right to touch her further.

On Wednesday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith interviewed MoveOn.org protestor Lauran Valle, who was stepped on during a protest outside of the Kentucky senate debate on Monday: “Less than a week before election day, the races are heating up, some even turn ugly. We’ll speak exclusively with a woman who was stomped on the head during a campaign melee.”

While CBS was eager to talk to Ms. Valle, in September 2009 the network failed to give any coverage to a man having his finger bitten off by a MoveOn.org supporter at a California ObamaCare rally. At the September 2 event, 65-year-old William Rice, an ObamaCare opponent, got into an altercation with an unidentified MoveOn protestor, who proceeded to bite off the tip of Rice’s left pinky finger. Not only did CBS not interview Rice about the violent attack, but it offered no mention of the incident at all.

In addition, on Wednesday, Smith did not report the fact that a Rand Paul supporter was assaulted by a Jack Conway supporter at the very same debate rally on Monday. As Emily Maxwell reported on KYPost.com, “…a Conway supporter stepped on the foot of a female Rand supporter, who recently had foot surgery, according to police. The woman was wearing a surgical boot, but after the injury, her incision was cut open.” NewsBusters’ Matthew Balan highlighted the same omission during CNN Tuesday coverage of the event.

That is essentially the piece I posted that started this whole…discussion. Not far from home for me. She admitted that she was hired by Moveon for this latest fiasco…In my opinion, she needs to get a life.

Maybe I’m missing something, but she did nothing that I’m aware of that would constitute a threat of physical violence. Being there to protest, being obnoxious, or pushing your way to the front in order to make a bigger statement do not constitute acceptable causes of action to allow the crowd to pin you to the floor or to step on your shoulder (looked to me more like the neck, but regardless).

It really doesn’t matter what I do or say. If I don’t initiate violence or give you a very good reason to believe that I’m about to, you cannot touch me. Period.

Sorry Matt, but you say “even if that were true, which it is not”, I have to disagree here. It is battery, in fact battery can occur (simple battery) even if you do not touch the other party. Simply acting beligerant toward someone to the point to where they feel threatened can result in simple battery.

Now, do I condone the activity (on either part), no I do not. In the scheme of things, this is so minor it hardly bears mentioning.

Little girl she is not…but nonetheless, I am sure they did not feel directly threatened by her, but possibly were reacting to a possible threat to Dr. Paul. Does that make it right…no, but no more than her actions. Pretty much everyone holds some blame here…IMO.

I don’t want to pass judgment without seeing this footage, but regardless of what had transpired PRIOR to her being subdued, it does not excuse the behavior in stomping her head AFTER she had been subdued.

A Craven County voter says he had a near miss at the polls on Thursday when an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended.

Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.

“They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,” Laughinghouse said. “That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.”

M. Ray Wood, Craven County Board of elections chairman, issued a written statement saying that the elections board is aware of isolated issues and that in each case the voter was able to cast his or her ballot as desired.

Chuck Tyson, chairman of Craven County GOP, remains skeptical. He has been communicating with Wood about the issue and was invited to a meeting Wednesday with state elections officials. There were no further details about that meeting.

“Something is not right here,” Tyson told the Sun Journal. He said he “got two or three calls” from people describing the same problem while they were voting.

“I’ll be matter of fact, I didn’t find that press release satisfactory,” Tyson said, referring to Wood’s written statement.

Tyson reported other problems as well, including long lines waiting for just two voting machines in Havelock, and machines reporting 250 ballots cast where 400 voters had signed in to vote.

Laughinghouse cast his ballot at the county administration building at about 2:30 p.m., he said. After voting, he located a Republican worker on site and asked to speak with her about his voting machine issue. A man interrupted, he said, directing Laughinghouse to talk with him instead. That man said the machine likely needed to be calibrated, Laughinghouse said, and set about the method to do so.

“Each morning every voting unit is calibrated as per manufacturer instructions by trained election rovers,” Wood’s statement said. “These individuals are also working throughout the county each day to assist one-stop officials with any issues that arise during the course of voting.”

Laughinghouse advises voters to carefully check their ballots before confirming to ensure that the machine is logging each vote as intended.

“If you’re in a hurry, you may just push the button and not notice it,” he said.

He has become suspicious of voter fraud because of news reports he has heard. He would prefer voting machines to display an error message when they need to be calibrated, as opposed to completing ballots for the opposite party, he said.

“I’m all for our country and we know there has been voter fraud before and it continues even today,” Laughinghouse said. “So you get suspicious when something like this happens.”

The elections board also encourages voters to check their ballots carefully and to report any problems to poll staff before confirming the electronic ballot.

“It is our desire to provide the citizens of Craven County with the most honest and fair election possible,” Wood’s statement said. “With that in mind and because we seek to maintain the privacy of all voters whenever possible, we ask any voter, while in the act of voting, notify an election official immediately should they experience any difficulties in casting their ballot.”

Wood was unavailable to expand on his written comments on Friday afternoon, as he was in a conference, an elections office employee said. He did not return a phone message seeking additional comment as of press time.

Tyson said he’d like it if Craven County would scrap its voting machines.

“They never work, they’re late reporting, they screw up, they ain’t worth a damn and we ought to go back to paper ballots,” he said.

Here’s what the article doesn’t tell you, by a source in the Yuma County Recorder’s Office:

* These 3000 voter registration forms were all dropped off at once by the one group on the deadline to turn in voter registration forms.
* Almost all of the registrations were for the Democratic Party, a statistical improbability at best.
* Today, these same 3000 newly registered voters — as a group — had papers dropped off at the Yuma Recorder’s office requesting to be signed up for the permanent early voters list… which means the ballots will be mailed early, with no accountability.
* The Yuma Recorder’s office is checking the voter registration forms and have found that already more than 65% of them are invalid due to the registrant not being a citizen, wrong/invalid address, false signature, etc.

Well its not as Mi Familia is the same as the SEIU…oh wait:

Mi Familia Vota is one of two groups that reportedly registered thousands of new voters in and around Yuma last week.

Vote fraud in Pennsylvania?
Absentee ballots are often problematic for many reasons.

A trio of Bucks County residents backed by the county Republican committee say they have evidence linking Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy’s campaign to a scheme to flood the county voter registration office with fraudulent applications for absentee ballots.

In a petition filed Tuesday, county Republicans say the name of Murphy’s campaign manager appeared on a Bristol post office box where voters were urged in a series of letters paid for by the state Democratic Committee to send absentee ballot applications.

The county Republicans submitted with the petition a photograph of a note inside the mailbox that said, “Tim Percico and Paul Hampel only pick up mail.” Tim Persico is Murphy’s campaign manager, although his name is misspelled in the note. Hampel is a volunteer for the Democratic state committee who said he collects mail from the box.

While county and state Democratic officials denied involvement in the letter campaign or refused to discuss it, Persico said Tuesday that the “PA Vote 2010” project that paid for the letters is a partnership between Murphy’s campaign and the state Democrats.

Persico said the goal of the project is to help eligible Democratic voters obtain and cast absentee ballots. . .

The petition is the latest in a series of alarms county and state Republicans have sounded over an influx of questionable absentee ballot applications. Last week, Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler said his office would investigate allegations of fraud leveled by state and county Republican officials.

Voter Registration Director Deena Dean said her staff had rejected more than 600 defective absentee ballot applications as of Friday. Although the voter registration office continued to accept applications until the close of business Tuesday, Dean was unable to provide an updated total. . . . .

Attacks, like this one at the Torkham Pakistan border crossing, were part of scheme by the Taliban to raise the level of corrupt payments from American subcontractors trying to deliver gas and goods along a key supply route to Kabul, experts say.

AP

Attacks, like this one at the Torkham Pakistan border crossing, were part of scheme by the Taliban to raise the level of corrupt payments from American subcontractors trying to deliver gas and goods along a key supply route to Kabul, experts say.

As much as $1 billion in U.S. aid has been diverted from programs meant to stabilize Afghanistan and has wound up in the hands of the Taliban and other insurgency groups, war analysts and government auditors say.

In fact, they say, graft has gotten so bad that the U.S. government estimates that only about 10 percent of the aid budget actually reaches the people in Afghanistan who need it.

“Right now corruption is more important than the politics,” Michael Thibault, co-chairman of Congress’ independent and bipartisan Wartime Commission on Contracting, told FoxNews.com. “I have been there seven times in the last year and the estimates I have been told are that 20 to 40 percent of the aid funding goes to corruption.”

“The problem,” he said, “is the Afghan culture and the subcontracting practices of the companies that do business there.”

In the past few weeks investigations by the U.S. Senate and the inspector general of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have focused on how guard services that surround U.S. bases have been compromised by the Taliban, jeopardizing the safety of American troops, and how one company, DAI of Bethesda, Md., involved in rehabilitation was forced to pay $5 million in protection money to Taliban-connected groups.

But those familiar with the country say the scale of the corruption is far wider. “Virtually every transaction in Afghanistan involves some degree of payoff,” says Christine Fair of Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies. “Everyone is getting a piece of the money. If you want to get a clinic built, you have to make sure everyone in the village is paid off.”

“It is now the cost of doing business in Afghanistan,” she explained, attributing much of the most serious corruption to the “lack of a security footprint” by U.S. troops. For example, without the U.S. military guarding major transport routes, the safety of supply convoys and other key transportation has been left up to private companies. And that, she says, has formalized a massive protection industry that is run, in many but not all cases, by the Taliban.

“We should be surprised not that convoys are attacked, but by how few get attacked,” Fair said.

That is the same assessment that Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, gave to President Obama more than a year ago, according to Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars. “All the contractors for development projects pay the Taliban for protection and use of the roads, so American and coalition dollars help finance the Taliban,” Woodward wrote.

I was just reading this…utterly amazing how this crap happens. All the more reason to get our boys and girls out of there and back home. Truth be known, I would close all foreign bases and bring them all home. Then deploy them on our southern border…

Bush bears a lot of blame here, he started this war knowing to truly “win” it, we would have to secure massive popular support of the citizens there. Obama has followed Bush’s plans except for announcing withdraw dates. How do you win over a society that by our values, is amoral and corrupt?

Obama will claim victory, and run like hell. Then the Taliban will fill the vacuum. Any US supporters left will be executed, messily.

Barrack has been hailed as one of the greatest orators of modern times.
Seems like he’s been flubbing a lot of his lines lately. Not to worry, with you and Behar:lol: rushing to his defense, it will be ignored.

You know, people always said Dubya was an idiot. I never thought that. I think you have to be very smart to get to that position, even if you speak coherently. (Though I was diametrically opposed to virtually everything he did while in office.)

He gave some ok speeches, though they never really resonated with me – too much blind faith and flag waiving and simplistic us-or-them patriotism or invocations of God or our special destiny. It always just felt like everything was meant to stampede us into blind loyalty out of fear of The Other and discourage critical reasoning.

As for Obama, I think he’s a good speaker, but I think he might be slightly overrated in that department. He’s good. He can convey a nuanced view (something Bush rarely did) and he can speak with conviction (something Bush always did well).

But regardless of who you are or how good you are of a speaker, if you mess up every now and then.

Cherry-picking, but how “Presidential” is it to refer to your political opponents as enemies needing punishment. And why the flock does he never use such language against foreign nationals that have attacked Americans? Is this still the leader liberals want?

@LOI – that first sign will be in less than a week – then we’ll see how to define insanity eh?

The truer test will be what happens in the first half of 2011.

One key indicator may be how folks react to Open Enrollment periods at work. Where I work it is starting up in 2 weeks (after the midterms). In some companies it may have already started. Where my wife works they dropped a flat 8% hike across the board for health plans. Factor in a base comp increase of probably around 2% and we’re losing money – most people are not going to react well (I think) when they finally see the cost of what was called Health Care Reform. Some companies are having higher salaried brackets eat more of the cost increase (you make more money so you can afford to pay more – bahahahaha).

What will a GOP controlled House really be able to do if the Dems still control the Senate? I don’t think they’ll be able to do much – do you?

Agree…the only thing they will be able to do is to introduce legislation that would counter the Obama game plan…which would in turn either not pass the Senate, or be vetoed by BHO. This could effectively transfer the label of “party of no” to the Democrats…

@Terry – you may be close – its their opp to setup the 2012 election. If a GOP House focuses on economic issues versus cultural issues AND they present a strong 2012 POTUS candidate it could be a slam dunk.

@LOI – is “who” the leader I still want? Obama? Short answer is likely no. But there are no suitable alternatives imho. A GOP House may be the recent medicine to refocus the Feds or it may result in the most partisan play we’ve ever seen at the detriment to our Nation.

my company went up 12.5% I looked back at all my previous paychecks from previous years the most it ever went up before was 3.4%. And all the deductables and co-pays are the same as last year. Health care reform will lower costs my ass.

I’ve heard some interviews he has done, and he certainly says all the right things…if you are a conservative. Time will tell. Part of what everyone, IMO, needs to do is remain vigilant and hold elected officials accountable for their actions. If he slides on his values, then he should be a one term representative.

I reported last night that the Sharron Angle campaign had had a banner day fundraising, which the campaign attributed to the fact that The View co-host Joy Behar said of Angle on national television, “She’s going to hell, this bitch!”

The Angle campaign tells me that this morning they sent flowers and a thank you note to Behar:

Joy,

Raised 150K online yesterday– thanks for your help.

Sincerely,

Sharron Angle

UPDATE — I see Behar has responded:

“I would like to point out that those flowers were picked by illegal immigrants and they’re not voting for you, bitch.”

Clark County is where three quarters of Nevada’s residents and live and where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s son Rory is a county commissioner. Rory is also a Democratic candidate for governor.

Since early voting started, there have been credible reports that voting machines in Clark County, Nevada are automatically checking Harry Reid’s name on the ballot:

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid’s name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn’t alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

“Something’s not right,” Ferrara said. “One person that’s a fluke. Two, that’s strange. But several within a five minute period of time — that’s wrong.”

Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said there is no voter fraud, although the issues do come up because the touch-screens are sensitive. For that reason, a person may not want to have their fingers linger too long on the screen after they make a selection at any time.

Now there’s absolutely no independently verified evidence of chicanery with the voting machines (yet), but it is worth noting that the voting machine technicians in Clark County are members of the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU spent $63 million in elections in 2008 and is planning on spending $44 million more this election cycle — nearly all of that on Democrats. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is formerly the SEIU’s top lobbyist, and former SEIU president Andy Stern was the most frequent visitor to the White House last year.

Just in Nevada, the SEIU has given a lot to groups that are heavily vested in the state — in just one prominent example, the SEIU gave $500,000 to the Patriot Majority PAC, which has spent $1.3 million against Reid’s opponent Sharron Angle. They’ve and have dropped large sums directly on candidates:

NV-3

Joe Heck (R)

Oppose

$140,000.00

NV-3

Dina Titus (D)

Support

$344,984.00

NV-Senate

Sharron E. Angle (R)

Oppose

$225,000.00

Now the county voting technicians aren’t unique here — many of Clark County’s employees are also represented by the SEIU. But it is worth mentioning, the SEIU is hyperpoliticized and has seen its fair share of corruption. (It certainly seems more questionable than Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer with Republican ties that was at the center of many conspiracy theories on the left during the Bush administration.)

Unions increasingly have a major financial stake in election outcomes, both as a matter of their own election expenditures, and as a function of what they stand to gain if their legislative agenda is enacted. Should they really be responsible for tabulating the votes? That’s certainly something voters ought to think long and hard about.

Why are we spending millions of dollars to automate a process that is done two times a year, requires complex equipment to be set up and operated by teens to octagenarians, is completely untransparent, uses expensive equipment that cannot be used for anything else and that will be obsolete or broken in five years? A simple #2 pencil and a scantron works just fine and are a whole lot cheaper not to mention much more transparent with a written primary backup.

October 28, 2010
The Democrats’ Final Recourse: Massive Vote Fraud
By Selwyn Duke, American Thinker

The reports are rolling in from all over the country. A Craven County, NC resident attempts to vote a straight Republican ticket but his choices come up straight Democrat four times, despite receiving assistance from poll workers. In NC’s Lenoir County, registered Democrat Ervin Norville also tries to vote straight Republican but finds that his ballot has the names of several Democrat candidates selected. Boulder City, NV resident Joyce Ferrara says that when she and several others went to vote for Sharon Angle, they found that Senator Harry Reid’s name was already checked off. In Dallas County, TX’ congressional district 30, Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson’s name was the only one on the ballot in a few locations (no, she isn’t running unopposed). And some states have been late in mailing out military absentee ballots, whose recipients, interestingly, are known for their Republican leanings.

These happenings are generally referred to as “mistakes” and “glitches,” but if that’s all they are, then we’re witnessing a truly historic anomaly. Because either the mainstream media is now suppressing stories of mistakes and glitches benefitting Republicans, or the laws of probability have suddenly been rescinded and tossed coins are coming up donkey tails every time. Welcome to American elections, Venezuelan style.

I have long said that this election would see vote fraud of unprecedented magnitude. And it does seem that a perfect storm of such criminality is brewing. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just struck down an Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to vote, a treasonous act that facilitates vote fraud. Of course, some liberals are more forthcoming about their intentions; in Portland, ME and New York City, there is a push to allow non-citizens to vote. Not to be outdone, San Francisco seeks to allow even illegal aliens to cast ballots in school elections. Hey, why not? They’re not illegals – they’re undocumented Democrats.

Then there is the matter of the fox guarding the polling house. It has now been learned that the technicians who work on the Nevada voting machines that have been checking off Harry Reid’s name are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a leftist organization that has given tens of millions of dollars to Democrats. (By the way, do you remember all the complaints about “antiquated” paper ballots after the 2000 election? I knew that all the talk about “hanging chads” and the need for modern technology would lead to vote fraud. After all, now elections can be swayed by a well-placed, skilled hacker and there’s no paper trail.)

Add to this the fact that the left is more brazen than ever. For one thing, laymen liberals, like their judges, are very influenced by precedent. And the liberal delusion that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election – thus drawing first blood – gives leftists a handy rationalization for actually stealing elections. Second, Barack Obama’s DOJ’s refusal to prosecute the Philadelphia Black Panthers – despite videotape evidence of their voter intimidation – sends the message that the left has almost carte blanche to sway elections by any means necessary.

Most of all, though, we have to remember that leftists are, well, leftists. They are simply much more corrupt than those on the right. I know, this sounds like blind partisanship, so I’ll explain.

I’ll introduce this with a point once made by former military-intelligence man Ralph Peters about how you could understand the Taliban: You have to view them as aliens. His point was that most people have trouble conceiving of mindsets radically different from their own and, consequently, often mistakenly assume that others operate by the same principles they do. Even liberals recognize this phenomenon – when they warn of “ethnocentrism.” I, however, am more concerned about conservocentrism.

If you’re an average bright-eyed conservative and you really want to understand leftists, begin by viewing them as aliens. Because they really aren’t like you, and the difference isn’t simply ideology, either. They truly are far more dishonest, deceitful and manipulative than conservatives.

In explaining why this is so, I’ll again draw an analogy to Islamists. Many have pointed out that Western and Islamic thought dictate very different things with respect to honesty. While the West’s formative religion, Christianity, teaches that lying is a sin, period, Islam states that lying to an infidel for the glory of Allah is a good. In other words, Christians can lie, but they must commit what they consider a sin to do so. Muslims can do so with what they view as divine approval.

Another difference is that Islamic thought includes a concept known as “dual truth,” which basically states, writes American Thinker’s Patrick Poole, “that what may be true in the realm of religion may be contrary to what is true in nature.” Thus, even if an action is forbidden in Islamic texts, Muslims may be able to take it in the “real world.” It’s always convenient when you have more than one “truth” with which to justify behavior.

This brings us to liberals. Like Islamists, they have more than one “truth” from which to choose, something they readily admit to with pronouncements such as “That is your truth; someone else’s might be different.” To be precise, however, they use the word “truth” loosely, as a synonym for taste, and don’t actually believe in Truth, properly defined (i.e., divinely ordained morality). They are moral relativists.

What does this mean? It means the sky – or perhaps I should say the netherworld – is the limit for behavior restrictions. Unlike Islamists, they don’t have to find their justifications in medieval texts or complex philosophical contortions, as their credo is simple: “If it feels good, do it.” Without belief in anything that transcends man to use as a yardstick for behavior, they ultimately have nothing left to use but the “god within,” which is just a gussied-up name for emotion. And their emotion-driven ends really do justify their means. If they feel conservatives are “evil,” conservatives must be. And if they feel that any tactic necessary to vanquish that evil is fair game, it must be. Understand that beneath the light of their deified feelings, lying, cheating or stealing to win elections is not merely justifiable – it is a “good,” and one they do with the only approval they need: self-approval. They are aliens from a planet much like the Hell described by the Devil in an old comic strip (in The New Yorker, I think) when he said, “There’s no right or wrong down here. It’s whatever works for you.” It is a place where there is a wall of separation between man and Truth.

And the truth is that in this election, as in every one, some races will be close enough so that vote fraud can be a factor. So how should we proceed once results are in? First, conservatives need an attitude adjustment: They have to understand the nature of their enemy (as outlined above) and become warriors. We mustn’t for a moment entertain the notion that the best thing for the nation after a suspicious loss is to concede the race graciously. Rather, the best thing for the nation is to oust the alien vote-snatchers from power by any moral means necessary.

Second, we must recognize that razor-close races almost always go Democrat for a reason (think: Al Franken in Minnesota) and view every such loss as a probable vote-fraud scenario. Then we must analyze exit polling – which has become a very precise science – for discrepancies between its findings and election results. And when they are found, the matter must be sifted to the very bottom.

Alien vote-snatchers are worse than murderers. They not only steal votes but also our future; they undermine the rule of law and threaten the republic itself. In a saner time, they would probably be hanged. And if it becomes apparent that the government – the Eric Holder DOJ, judges and others – has become so corrupt that it will preserve its power by negating the votes of the people, then we should consider our Founding Fathers’ words: “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it….”

Recently, an exploit was identified that, in my opinion, is a very serious assault on the privacy and security of Internet users of social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, and online email services, such as Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo.

The exploit genre is called “Side-Jacking”.

A “sniffer” – a computer that captures all data sent on a wire or unsecured wireless- sorts and searches for keywords like “hotmail.com” or “facebook”, and then takes the data and copies it. In that data stream will contain a “cookie” which is a little package that contains your authorization credentials to -say- your Facebook page.

The Side-Jack copies and installs this cookie as its own, and uses the “token” to gain access to your account. It is NOT stealing your password. It is copying a “ticket” that was created AFTER you logged in that lets you (and the villain) access to the web site without always have to log in every time you click on your page.

The villain can then access your Facebook/Hotmail as if he was “you”.

The seriousness of this exploit is further magnified by the condition that even if you change your password on these sites, IT DOES NOT BLOCK THE VILLAIN once he has copied your cookie!

Since the cookie does not have a password, but is a “ticket” to pass through to your site, changing your password does not invalidate a previously created ticket – the ticket remains “good” for entry, and probably good for entry up to 30 days.

This last Sunday, this exploit was significantly and seriously enhanced by the creation of a Firefox (an internet browser) “plugin” that automatically takes the task of the sniffer, the copying of cookies, and nicely presents an icon for the user to “click” on that will push the captured Facebook/Twitter/Hotmail website and account. It is so keen, that it will pre-load the site “picture” and site “name” of, say, your Facebook page into the icon -proving it has direct access to the captured site!

This plugin is called “Firesheep” and is going viral on the internet right now. The author announced its creation and publication at a conference highlighting the lack of security at social media sites. An Internet Security Profession happened by an internet cafe the next day in another city, and saw someone using the plugin to capture other people’s Facebook cookies!

The Firesheep is configured to snoop for specific web addresses, such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter. However, it comes with a configuration tool and scripting language that can be used to snoop ANY web address that uses “cookies” to establish a login access.

The risks:
-unsecured wireless networks, such as internet cafes or possibly your own home unsecured wireless network.
-untrusted wired networks, such as conference centers or in-room hotel wired Internet.
-trusted networks, such as in offices and workplaces where co-workers can install this plugin and undetected, capture you logging in to your Hotmail while at work.

The Fix:
The social media sites and Microsoft have been completely silent on addressing this exploit to date.

However the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a work-around that can protect people who use FIREFOX as their browser. This workaround forces the use of a secured, encrypted cookie that invalidatesthe “copying” by any sniffer. The cookie can be copied, but the contents are encrypted and unusable. The link to this workaround is at the bottom of this post.

Please note: this workaround is applied to a COMPUTER, not your Facebook or Hotmail account. If you move to another computer, the workaround must be installed there, too.

At this time, THERE IS NO WORKAROUND FOR INTERNET EXPLORER or GOOGLE CHROME.

I’ve provided a link at the bottom to Mozilla Firefox browser, if you do not have this already installed.

If you do not want to use Firefox, please be extremely careful where you access your social media/internet mail.

The only other option is to not use any site that may contain a login account or personal information that does not support Secure Shell (HTTPS or SSH). All banking and financial sites DO use Secure Shell, and therefore are not at threat.

HOWEVER, if the exploit breaches your email service, the villain could go to your banking site (you send yourself “online statements” to your email, right?), and request a “I forgot my password, and email it me”. Some financial sites will request some personal info – but he has your Facebook, where you’ve listed all your personal info, right? – and volia! – your money is now at risk.

Please note: normal web “surfing” is not under threat. The exploit is attacking your social media sites or email, and normal web surfing does not normally require a login ID or password.

Unbelievable….Janet Napolitano states: ” I know every inch of the border and have driven it myself. There is no more violence down there than anywhere else in the United States ” (Matt, please check your Red Bull supply. I think that it has been depleted without your knowledge)…but wait, there is more….On the Lake Falcon murders she states ” If there is a crime, we do not know this yet, then it is a local jurisdiction ” ( Hmmmm…Matt, better check your grog supply as well ) So let me try to interpret….(1) if there is a crime ( being shot dead and the body and Jet Ski missing apparently is not a crime…even with a witness and a video of the other Jet Ski being chased ) then it is a local jurisdiction. So, in other words, since the incident happened on the Internatinal Border with Texas and it is now a local jurisdiction…so the Federal Government just gave up its rights to the International Border of the United States and Mexico to TExas??????? Cool….

She has further stated that there is no credible eveidence of snipers down on the border and to suggest same is scare tactics ginned up by the republican party to cast dispersion upon Obama. When questioned on the letters sent from the Texas attorney general to her department concerning the requests for Federal help, she responded that she has seen no letters or requests from Texas. THen she states ” We have to look at the big picture of everything and the border with Mexico does not need to receive any more scrutiny than the rest of our agenda.

Then, are you ready for this….when questioned specifically on the 14-22 million illegal immigrants in the United States, she responds..” that is why we need immigration reform so that there would not be 14-22 million illegal immigrants in the United States”

Never mind Matt….it is obvious that she took it…and speed balled it. Geez….what an administration….but that is progression, I guess.

Nigerian media reports said the ship, which came from Iran, docked in Lagos’ port for a few hours only, unloaded 13 containers and sailed on.

The bill of lading said the shipment consisted of building materials, Nigerian State Security Service spokeswoman Marilyn Ogar said.

“On opening the first container, the service operatives discovered rocket launchers, grenades and other explosives,” Ogar said, adding the weapons were concealed among crates of floor tiles.

The SSS had received intelligence ahead of time about the intention to smuggle weapons in containers via Lagos and was prepared for it, reports said.

Nigerian National Security Adviser Andrew Owoye Azazi declined to say what ship carried the weapons into the port. He said the federal government would destroy the weapons.

According to the Nigerian media, the clearing agent in charge of unloading the containers from the ship offered to bribe the Nigerian customs officers to transfer the containers to an off-dock terminal, where they could be screened outside the port. The customs officials alerted the security services, who ordered the containers opened.

LOI….this is impossible. Iran has peaceful intentions all over the world and would never subject itself to smuggling and arming of other countries and creating and backing insurgency and terrorist activity. How dare you !!!!!!

The demise of the politically connected ShoreBank has sparked yet another investigation — one that could spell trouble for FDIC chief Sheila Bair.

The FDIC Inspector General’s office has launched a wide-ranging probe into the failure of Chicago-based ShoreBank earlier this year, including the role played by Bair in prodding Wall Street’s biggest firms, from Goldman Sachs (GS: 162.89 ,+2.65 ,+1.65%) to JPMorgan (JPM: 37.90 ,+0.35 ,+0.93%) to Morgan Stanley (MS: 24.49 ,+0.09 ,+0.37%), in donating tens of millions of dollars to prevent the bank, with close ties to the Obama administration, from failing.

ShoreBank did fail in August, with the FDIC taking over $2.16 billion in faulty assets, including risky investments in urban real estate, from the bank. But the Wall Street money raised during the summer wasn’t returned. Instead, it used by ShoreBank’s management with the approval of the FDIC to form a new bank that will take over some of the bank’s better-performing assets and its deposits under a new name, the Urban Partnership Bank.

Officials on Wall Street have told the FOX Business Network that they felt political pressure from the Obama administration to contribute a total of about $150 million to recapitalize ShoreBank and the new institution. Valerie Jarrett, the president’s senior economic adviser has close ties to the bank, and the president himself has singled out the bank for praise for its community lending and for financing environmentally friendly green jobs. Jarrett has adamantly denied any involvement in the matter.

Sorry BF…you are the disillusioned one here… but that is ok..You have your opinon..I have mine.

First…it is not the recent documents that I refer to on Wikileaks…it is the entire Wikileaks program that is moderately accurate and sanitized.

Second, point me in the direction of torturing children….which, I consider, is hypocrisy and bullshit. I have not seen it and I have been in the worst of it.,,,but I will digress if you can show me this. I have seen torture methods on soldiers which I did not agree with on some and agreed with on others (Waterboarding for example)…I would never agree with electrical shock or yanking fingernails or the methods used by Iran and Saudi Arabia. But I would like to see, as a policy, the massacre of innocent civilians unles you are copping out and saying war, in itself, is the killing of innocents. We can argue both sides all day on this.

Third, it is another cop out to say that disclosure of classified material that results in more death and hardship is somehow stellar and bears no responsibility. Sorry but a pawn shop that buys stolen material from a thief is a thief itself.

Fourth, you are in no position to determine whom or what defines Patriot. Do not go there.

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please sent them here.]

Hey have you heard that Democrats are out-spending Republicans this year? Well, here is one of the reasons why:

Shortly after Labor Day, as polls continued to sink, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) realized it needed a cash infusion for the upcoming midterm elections. Its chairman, former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, turned to the Bank of America to secure a $15 million revolving credit line. Then, in the middle of this month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) got another loan from BofA [Bank of America] for an additional $17 million.

What was their collateral? It turns out, not much.

The DNC claims their collateral was an intangible piece of property — its donor mailing list. The DCCC only cites unnamed “assets.” Neither party organization possesses real estate even close to cover the $32 million. The DNC’s headquarters is owned by another entity. Even it was put up as collateral, its market value was last estimated at only $13.7 million.

As they say, read the whole thing. So we bail out Bank of America. And Bank of America bails out the Democratic party. How cozy. Aren’t you glad to know that your tax money is funding one side of the debate?

Mr. President, if corporate money spent in an election is a “threat to democracy” then what do you call this? Oh, wait, I know: the Chicago way.

And this comes on the heels of news that Barney Frank (D-bag) has received a lot of money from the very banks that received bailouts and which he is supposed to be monitoring. And he promised not to do this.

I mean, sure, it is possible that these people just spontaneously decided to give money to the Democrats because they agreed with them on abortion or some reason other than as payback for the infusions of our money put into their pockets. But at the very least, there is a very obvious appearance of impropriety, here.

No wonder we have fallen out of the list of the top twenty least corrupt nations.

Exposing the way unions exploit the workers is way overdue. They have been doing this for a long time and getting away with it, to the point they are beginning to believe they are above the law…sort of like politicians…

Michigan Ballot: What does this mean? They want to revise the constitution to say what?

PROPOSAL 10-1 A PROPOSAL TO CONVENE A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION FOR THE PURPOSE OF DRAFTING A GENERAL REVISION OF THE STATE CONSTITUTION Shall a convention of elected delegates be convened in 2011 to draft a general revision of the State Constitution for presentation to the state’s voters for their approval or rejection?

Proposal 1: Constitutional convention to draft revision of state constitution

Print | E-mail | Letter to the editor

By: Joseph Lichterman

Published October 26th, 2010

Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, the Democratic candidate for governor, and Republican nominee Rick Snyder agree on very little. However, they are unified in their opposition to Proposal 1.

Prop. 1 is a constitutionally mandated measure that appears on the ballot every 16 years and requires Michigan voters to decide whether or not to convene a constitutional convention to rewrite the state’s constitution.

This will be the third time since the state’s constitution was rewritten in 1962 that a proposal for a ConCon has appeared on the ballot. The two previous proposals were handily voted down in 1978 and 1994.

All indications show that this year will be no different.

According to an article in the Detroit News, a poll conducted earlier this month by Mitchell Research and Communications revealed that 44 percent of Michigan voters oppose a constitutional convention, while 25 percent support it. Thirty-one percent of voters were undecided.

In an interview with the Daily, Communications Prof. Michael Traugott said the proposal will likely not pass.

“My suspicion is that this is an issue that involves a lot of inertia and the public will probably conclude that the risks (of having a constitutional convention) outweigh the probable benefits, and therefore it will fail again,” Traugott said.

Bernero said he opposes Prop. 1 for financial reasons. Estimates show that the ConCon could cost the state $45 million and Bernero said the state simply can’t afford that at this time.

“Writing a whole new constitution diverts state leaders’ attention from what should be every leaders’ top concern right now — creating jobs,” Bernero wrote in an e-mail to the Daily. “Also, a constitutional convention could cost tens of millions of dollars, money the state doesn’t have right now.”
Snyder, meanwhile, said he believes the ConCon would cause special interest groups to bring up controversial issues that would divide the state at a time when the state should focus its attention on things like the economy and job creation.

“The reality is that special interests from across the country would flood into Michigan and turn the whole convention into a circus at a time when our state, both elected officials and citizens, need to be focused on the immediate economic and government fiscal crisis before us,” Snyder said on his campaign website.

On the other hand, Traugott said, ConCon supporters argue that a constitutional convention would allow the state to address issues with the legislature, the state budget and the economy.

“The people who support this argue, primarily, that the current constitution is outdated,” Traugott said. “We need to have a general revision to update the constitution to be able to deal with contemporary economic issues in particular.”

Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm is one of the main proponents of the ConCon.

Graham Davis, a spokesman for Gov. Granholm, said in a telephone interview that Granholm supports Prop. 1 because she believes the current constitution is outdated.

“Gov. Granholm is supportive of Proposal 1 because she believes the state of Michigan is very different than it was in 1961 and we need a foundational document that reflects the 21st century,” Davis said. “Having a constitutional convention would set the stage for a streamlined government that moves Michigan forward in a comprehensive way.”

If the measure passes, another election will be held within the next six months to elect 148 delegates to the ConCon. One delegate from each state House and Senate district would be elected. Then, after the new document is drafted by the convention, another statewide vote would be held to ratify the new constitution.

Ultimately, nobody knows how long the process of rewriting the constitution would actually take. In 1962, the process took seven months, but according to the Detroit News, some estimate it could take over a year to complete, and ratify, a new constitution.

Thanks you guys! Nothing like going around the country to find out what’s going on in my state. I don’t remember this from ’94 and I was only 16 in ’78. I think I’m with both candidates.. Down it goes!

Hoo boy….what a come back…..So, Barney Madoff did not INTEND to harm people….just steal money. So banks do not intend to bolster their pfofits by unscrupulous banking practices that tear peoples lives apart….it is an accident. So, it is not the Barney Frank’s and the Fannie Mae’s and the Freddie Mac’s and lending practices designed to make people lose that is horrible….it is business. So, since it is not government or military…it is ok. But that is the statement of an anarchist. I get it.

I would define evil the same way, BF. A group of investors rig a lending practice to make money of the misfortunes of others and it was intended…..is no different than a bullet in the head. What I have seen banks do and hospitals and politicians is also evil and evil is not in degrees…..is it?

The Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority reports that last year’s costs for such elective procedures as chemical peels and other skin treatments are up $8 million over the 2004 tab for cosmetic surgery provided under the teachers’ union contract.

School district officials say teachers or their dependents accounted for 90 percent of the approximately 500 people who received cosmetic surgery last year. About 10,000 district employees are eligible for the benefit.

The president of the teachers’ union says the union has agreed to give up the benefit in the next contract.

And so the reign of Obamanomics terror ends in a Democratic Civil War that will more than likely keep the progressive liberal out of mainstream politics for at least a half a century folks…

An Open Letter to Rush Limbaugh and His Listeners — With Notes on the Democrat Civil War Already In Progress by Kevin DuJan

Dear Rush,

It’s my great hope that some of your listeners find a way to get this letter to you, or that it makes it to “Snerdley” and finds its way into your hands. I don’t think even you understand just how much damage Obama has done to the Democrat Party — to the point where formerly lifelong Democrats like myself, and everyone here at HillBuzz.org, are actively working to expose the party and literally burn it to the ground for the good of the country.

None of this is being reported in the media, but a Civil War in the Democrat ranks has been raging since May 31st, 2008…a date every Hillary Clinton supporter knows well, because that was the date of the Democrat Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting where Howard Dean (then-DNC Chair), Donna Brazile, and scores of other Kool-Aid slurping Obama flunkies took off their masks and revealed the full extent of the Leftist coup that had taken over the party. This was the day when the DNC took delegates Hillary Clinton won in Michigan away from her and handed them to Obama (despite the fact he wasn’t even on the primary ballot in that state, because he removed his name when his campaign realized he’d come in third in that race).

May 31st, 2008 was a day when Hillary “babes” (as you call us sometimes) like us flew to Washington in large numbers to stand outside the Marriott near the National Zoo, where this Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting was held, to shout for the DNC to count all the votes and operate the nominating process fairly — but they refused. The anger over that day has never abated. In fact, it’s grown considerably since then.

This was the determining factor in millions of us leaving the Democrat Party for good. This was the day when the P.U.M.A. movement began — in response to Donna Brazile’s calls for “party unity” following the Rules & Bylaws Committee Meeting, we “Hillary babes” said “Party Unity My A$$” (or People United Means Action, depending on how you want to phrase it). Exit polls showed 8 million PUMA voted Republican for the first time in our lives in the fall of 2008…casting ballots for McCain/Palin (and in truth, mainly for Palin, whom we support, and not to a small degree because she receives many of the same attacks lobbed at Hillary Clinton all these years).

You seem to know most of all this, so I’ll end the history lesson by noting the people alienated by the Democrat Party during the primaries in 2008 — where it was clear the party and the media colluded at great lengths to push Obama while hammering Hillary Clinton into the ground — never came back to the Democrat Party.

This is also when most of us stopped using the term “Democratic Party”, since there’s nothing “democratic” about these people. They are the “Democrat Party”, and even that is hard to acknowledge because they really and truly have proved themselves to be enemies of real democracy.

I’m still registered as a Democrat here in Chicago (because the Cocktail Party GOP establishment so disgusts me I can’t will myself to party-ID Republican, and there’s no Independent option here in Illinois) but I can’t imagine ever voting for another Democrat again, as long as I live. To Hell with Democrats. This was solidified for me on Christmas Eve of last year, when Democrats rushed Obamacare through the Senate in the dead of night, through various secret channels, and every single Democrat voted for its passage (even supposed moderates like Evan Bayh in Indiana, who quickly realized his vote would cost him re-election…so the coward retired rather then face angry voters over what he did). I just don’t believe Democrats should be given elected office by voters because they cannot be trusted to even read bills before they vote on them, not even when said bills seek to permanently alter the entire American economy. This is reckless and reprehensible to the point of treason.

I was a Democrat for 32 years before the heavy-handed push for Obama alienated me from the party…and I borrow what Hillary Clinton said about Republicans once, back when she was a Goldwater Girl, and will paraphrase by saying that I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me.

After it beat me to a pulp, called me a racist, berated and insulted me, and used Alinsky Rules to hit me with everything it had. Not just me, but all Hillary supporters.

This is the part I don’t think you understand because I don’t know if you and your listeners paid much attention to what the Obama campaign and DNC did to malign and assault Hillary Clinton’s supporters during the 2008 campaign. None of this has been forgotten by any of us.

If you have not seen it already, Rush, you need to watch Gigi Gaston’s documentary “We Will Not Be Silenced 2008″. I’m featured in a segment on the voter fraud that was committed in the Iowa Caucus back in January of 2008. While I was always aware Democrats use unions and other means to cheat in elections, I never knew the Democrat Party was capable of the large-scale, aggressive, unapologetic fraud it committed on Obama’s behalf all through 2008. In Iowa, I watched Obama’s ACORN and SEIU goons push and shove old people, bully them, and intimidate them when they wanted to vote for Hillary Clinton. I saw scores of Illinois license plates fill the parking lots outside caucus locations, with Chicagoland Obama supporters illegally entering the Caucus sites to vote for Obama and game Iowa for him. Having planned ahead, Obama supporters actually RAN those caucus sites, and held the doors open for all these fraudulent voters to walk right in, without being asked for IDs, where they then took control of the caucuses and bullied the Iowa residents into supporting Obama — lest they be called RAAACISTS! out in the open in front of their friends and neighbors in those open-air caucuses.

The media has never talked about this. I don’t remember ever hearing you talk about it. But one of the biggest reasons the Democrats are in the trouble they’re in right now is because of how frequently the Left and the media (one and the same, really) called anyone who opposed Obama a RAAACIST. If you supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries instead of Obama, you were called a RAAACIST. If you were someone like me who fundraised for Hillary, who hosted events for her, who put yourself out there and wrote columns advocating her or did media spots talking up her candidacy, you were aggressively targeted by the Obama campaign and his supporters…relentlessly attacked as a RAAACIST! and assaulted with the Alinksy Rules for Radicals in hopes of breaking your spirit, terrorizing you, and making you abandon Clinton for fear of having these people destroy your life, ruin your business, and make you an absolute pariah in your community.

This is what the Obama campaign, the media, and the DNC did to DEMOCRATS.

For almost a year, the Obama zealots and the Left waged all-out-war not just on Hillary Clinton, but on lifelong, loyal, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat voters like me. This came straight from the top, from Obama himself. Both he and his wife Michelle called the Clintons racists. Obama’s surrogates like James Clyburne, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and others called Geraldine Ferraro, Madeline Albright, and others racists. The Obamas toxified the South Carolina primary, in particular, with foul race-baiting and turned North Carolina and Indiana into racial powder kegs by ramping up accusations that anyone not supporting Obama was a vile racist that needed to be pounded into the ground.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones, my former Congresswoman back home in Cleveland, was a black Hillary Clinton supporter to the very end — and she was called a “race-traitor”, an “Aunt Jane”, and all manner of worse names as she was bullied, berated, and verbally assaulted by the Obama team…because she was black and dared to stand with her friend Hillary Clinton, the person Tubbs Jones knew would make a better president than “The One”. To her dying day in August of 2008, Tubbs Jones was threatened by the Obama campaign and told she’d be primaried in 2010 and kicked to the curb for being a “race-traitor”. She died of a brain aneurysm while driving her car, and Obama supporters filled Daily Kos, DemocratUnderground, and other George Soros-supported sites with lies about her drunk driving, doing drugs, and other slurs because even after she died these people wouldn’t stop hating her for daring to be an outspoken black woman who would never abandon Hillary for Obama.

This is similar to the grief that I’ve received here in Chicago for being a gay Hillary former Democrat in Boystown who never drank any Kool-Aid, never stopped speaking out against Obama, and who recently fully came out as a conservative — in the face of the same kind of Alinsky-grade, identity-based, “traitor” hectoring that Tubbs Jones got for being a black woman who didn’t kneel before the Obama altar.

Well, Rush, let me just tell you, from personal experience, that the tens of millions of people relentlessly abused and hounded by Obama supporters (remember that back in 2008 he urged his followers to “get in their faces” and “confront their neighbors” if they weren’t drinking his unicorn-pumped sparkly Kool-Aid ) will NEVER EVER FORGET what the Obama campaign directed at them, in terms of all this Alinsky bullying.

To quote Jeremiah Wright, the man Obama spent twenty years eagerly listening to at Trinity United Church of Christ: somebody’s chickens have now come back to roost.

During the campaign, Donna Brazile famously said that the Democrat Party no longer needed the people Obama once described as “bitter, religion-and-guns-clinging, Midwesterners”. Brazile took this further and said, outright, that the Democrat party did not need blue-collar white voters, the Jacksonian voters, the Hillary voters, because the party was “Obamafied” and would win elections for generations with the Obama coalition of blacks, Leftist elites, Hispanics, low information gay voters, and self-hating Jews.

This is all the Democrats have left, Rush.

Speaking from personal experience, as someone who has worked in fundraising for over 10 years and who has been a part of every presidential campaign since 1992, the Democrats have permanently alienated tens of millions of people who normally turned out reliably every year not just to vote Democrat, but also to write checks and otherwise participate in campaigns.

No more. Never again.

Here in Chicago, just about everyone who was part of Team Hillary efforts with me on the ground has completely divorced themselves from the Democrat Party. Being called a racist repeatedly and hearing from Donna Brazile that we are not needed will do that to a person.

But in a bigger sense, Democrats, by being so shameless and aggressive with the voter fraud in 2008 have opened too many eyes for us to ever go back to pretending that fraud and corrupt practices aren’t the hallmark of the Democrat Party.

There was a show on ABC a few years ago called Alias starring Jennifer Garner in which she played a woman working for a company called Credit Dauphine…which she was told was a front for a CIA organization called SD6. Garner’s character, Sidney Bristow, carried out her missions for SD6, overlooking different things the organization did that she might not have liked, because she thought she was doing what was best for the country. And then, one day, Sidney learned SD6 was actually an enemy of America…that it’s real mission was to destroy the country…that everything Sidney was told about SD6 was a lie. The mask came off SD6, and Sidney Bristow realized she had to work aggressively to take the whole enterprise down.

Rush (and his listeners), please hear me on this because you will not read this in the media — but just about every one of us from the Hillary 2008 campaign is a Sidney Bristow today.

Those of us who worked Democrat campaigns in the past put up with union associations and the other unsavory aspects of being a Democrat because we were told this was the only way Democrats could win…with union muscle. But, in 2008 the Democrats revealed themselves to be an SD6 conglomeration of every force in this country that wants to bring America down, tank our economy, usurp our Constitution, and lay waste to the American way of life.

Democrats took off the mask. The DNC reveled in being fully Leftist-controlled. Crazy people unapologetic in their Communist admiration took over positions of great influence not just in the DNC, but in our state and federal governments as well.

I’m horrified by that.

Hillary supporters are horrified by that.

And we have not sat back quietly to allow this to happen without a fight.

I know for a fact that people I worked with on the Hillary 2008 campaign have been actively working against every single Democrat who supported Obama’s nomination. Everyone who backstabbed Hillary Clinton is being undermined and sabotaged by people who might still be registered as Democrats but have no more loyalty to the party. Sometimes, conservative sites try to make this into a “sour grapes” sort of “Hillary’s revenge” meme — and there might be a taste of this in what’s going on — but the real driving force is that we former Democrats saw just how insane these people really are and we are now doing everything we can, behind the scenes, to use everything we know about the Democrat Party to collapse it from within.

If you think about it logically, there is not enough energy to sustain a years-long drive to remove Obama supporters from office just because people are still upset Hillary Clinton was not the 2008 nominee and is not president today. Sometimes, I think even you believe this is what this is all about. Your “Reverse Operation Chaos” initiative seems predicated on this, but that belief is apocryphal in that it misses a few big marks.

This is and it isn’t about Hillary.

What it’s really about is what the Democrat Party did to Hillary that alienated tens of millions of Jacksonian/Clintonian/middleclass Americans from the party permanently — and this includes what the party and Obama campaign did to Hillary’s supporters themselves (ie, calling them racists, telling them they weren’t wanted, calling them bitter clingers, etc.).

For the first time in our lives, so many of us former Democrats were given an Alinsky taste of what the Democrat Party really stand for…what it really believes…and how it really feels about America, our Constitution, our economy, and our way of life.

As part of your “Reverse Operation Chaos”, you really need to emphasize something the media just won’t talk about — and that’s the simple fact that even if you called yourself a Democrat for 32 years, the way I did, because everyone you grew up with and everyone in your family was a Democrat, that in 2010 it’s time to ask yourselves what that really means.

Do you want to be in a party that calls people racists for stepping out of line and voicing opposition to the socialist lurch of the current administration?

Do you condone voter fraud and the shameless, undemocratic tactics employed by Democrats?

Do you wish to associate with the likes of ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, and all the other thugs, goons, and degenerates the Obama campaign and White House employ as the DNC’s muscle on the ground?

It is crystal clear that being a patriotic American who loves this country is intellectually incompatible with being a Democrat. If you love America and want it to prosper, the Democrat Party is at absolute odds with everything we need for a thriving, successful economy.

Hillary supporters realize this.

We received a heaping helping of Alinsky assaults to wake us up to this reality.

The reason so many of us support Governor Palin is not just because we see the same Alinksy assaults being waged upon her…but the woman is pitch-perfect in outlining exactly why Obama and the Left are wrong, and why Democrats under Obama are dangerous to have in elected office.

I know you talk about a “Hillary 2012″ but Rush, as much as I love Hillary Clinton, and as much as I worked my heart out for her in 2008, there’s no way that even she can repair the damage Obama has done to the party. Certainly not by 2012. MAYBE the Clintons and their supporters can purge the Obama lunatics from the party by 2016…but I doubt even that will happen. Just like with the Leftists Carter infected the Democrat Party with, Obama legacy hires will be in the DNC for a generation to come…and it might not be until the 2030s before the Democrats can remove the taint Obama and his Leftist agenda have put on the party.

Democrats have made themselves synonymous with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-democracy. Obama and his acolytes decidedly upped the ante when it came to their aggressive push towards socialism…and this Center-Right nation is resisting it in what I am certain will be an epic refudiation (to borrow the Governor’s term) next week.

On November 3rd, no one I know will be resting on any laurels. November 3rd starts the 2012 campaign…and not just the presidential race (where we’ll back Governor Palin) but the drive to knock people like Claire McCaskill out of office, continuing our work to take down every last one of the Obama supporters who backstabbed Hillary Clinton and helped install this socialist into the White House back in 2008. When you hear talk of a Hillary “enemies’ list”, or just “The List” as we call it in HRC supporter circles, this is very much real…and we are truly committed to making sure the Claire McCaskills out there get everything that is coming to them for all their service to Obama and his agenda.

Hear that, Ben Nelson…voters will be coming for you.

You and everyone like you.

Every last one of you.

If you voted for Obamacare, you are politically dead but may not know it…and it is your own fault. Being intensely stupid is no defense. If you were a YES vote on anything related to Obamacare you are going to be defeated…if not in 2010, then in the primaries in 2012. If you survive those, you will be taken down in the 2012 general election. Your political career is over…dummy.

Hope your time on the Obama Kool-Aid bandwagon was worth ruining your life over.

We will not forget those Obamacare votes. We will not forgive being called a racist because we don’t support this terrible man and his awful agenda. We will not be silenced.

We will not give up.

It’s going to be years, if ever, before the lamestream media ever catches up to any of this, and realizes that a large swath of people who used to be Democrat loyalists are now doing everything they can to destroy the party. Some of them are out and open, like me and my friends here at HillBuzz, but many are doing their part quietly. They just stop writing checks. Or maybe now they write checks to Democrat opponents. They might continue to attend events and fundraisers, but now they call up Republican sites and give them all the dirt on what they heard in those meetings. The Democrat Party alienated so many people who are now working to bring it down that I could go on for pages and pages more on this topic.

It’s very Sidney Bristow, Rush. And if you watched that show Alias, you’d know she not only won in the end, but looked damn good kicking ass while doing it.

THAT, El Rushbo, is what your “Hillary babes” are up to.

Here in Boystown, and in every town, because the Civil War Howard Dean, Donna Brazile, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Obama started on May 31st, 2008 is raging without end until the Democrat Party is no more.

Looks like the Clintons are about to unleash their full political might against Obama.Evidently they are seeing the light as to the implications of what this hi-jacked “Democratic” far left leaning administration has really done to the Democratic Party. “If your a Democrat you are now labeled in the same frame as Socialists, Maoists and Communists!”The Democratic voter base has been destroyed.